In the scene, Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) and Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) walk through the main entrance of the Natural History Museum and head to the right. The Natural History of Museum of Los Angeles was used as the interior of the concert hall’s lobby area. They wound up using three different locales to stand in for the opera house. So director Garry Marshall and his team had to scramble to find a different last-minute location at which to film. In a bad twist of fate, while the scene was originally set to be lensed at S.F.’s iconic War Memorial Opera House, a few days before the shoot date, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck, rendering the city, and War Memorial, unfilmable. I originally got Nat, who is a native San Franciscan, involved in the hunt because I had assumed that the building used in Pretty Woman was located somewhere in the City by the Bay.
Then on Monday afternoon, I got a text from my good friend Nat letting me know that she had found the site – in Pittsburgh of all places! (I should mention here that Nat is not AT ALL into stalking, so this truly was a feat!)
I call that “spaghetti-style stalking” – let’s just throw some locations out there and see what sticks – and it is maddening! Anyway, while I knew that the Natural History Museum did not stand in for the exterior of the Pretty Woman opera house, I had no idea what location actually was used and spent the next year and a half trying to figure it out. Once upon a time, someone made the claim that the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles was used as the exterior of the Pretty Woman opera house and everyone else just jumped on the bandwagon without doing any of their own investigating.
Which begs the question – how does erroneous information like this get published? Yet again, the answer is shoddy research and lazy reporting. And while the interior of the museum did, in fact, appear in the movie, I took one look at the exterior and knew without a doubt that it was not the exterior shown in Pretty Woman.Īs you can see below, the Pretty Woman opera house and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, while somewhat similar, are most definitely NOT one and the same. Last January, while on a Pretty Woman kick, I dragged the Grim Cheaper out to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, where filming of the opera scene is said by several websites to have taken place. I am talking about the exterior of the supposed San Francisco opera house featured in the 1990 classic romantic comedy Pretty Woman. Today’s locale is one that I have been trying to track down for over a year and a half now – ever since discovering that pretty much every other location website out there had gotten it wrong.